Social Media during the Boston Marathon Bombings
November 2013
Voiceover: Beat Intro
00:00
This is the Beat—a podcast series that keeps you in the know about the latest community policing
topics facing our nation.
Kimberly Brummett
00:08
Hello and welcome. My name is Kimberly Brummett, and on behalf of the COPS Office I’d like to
introduce you to Cheryl Fiandaca. Miss Fiandaca is the chief of the Public Information Bureau at the
Boston Police Department and has been nationally recognized in the media for her role in using social
media, specifically Twitter, to get information out to the public during the Boston Marathon bombings
and subsequent manhunt. Today she is here with us to discuss not only the challenges and successes
during that tense time period, but also some of her lessons learned and promising practices in using
social media to convey law enforcement information to the public. Welcome.
Cheryl Fiandaca
00:45
Thank you for having me.
Kimberly
00:47
Prior to the marathon bombings, you were brought into the department by Commissioner Davis to
increase the department’s social media presence. What was your strategy for doing this, and what
were some of the opportunities and challenges that the Commissioners presented you with?
Cheryl
01:01
A couple of things. One, I was really focused on the social media as well and saw this as a real
opportunity to be able to tell the department’s story, to break its own news, and to sort of control the
flow of information that was coming out of the police department. I was fortunate in that
infrastructure was already here. I inherited a pretty robust social media presence already. We already
had folks on Twitter, we already had a Facebook page, and we already had a blog set up called
BPDnews.com.
All I did was just start to use it in a different way. In addition to just pushing out information that we
were giving to the media, we were pushing out information before we were giving it to the media. If
we had an event happen, we took that as an opportunity to blog the information, put it on Facebook,
and to Tweet it. The media could take that information from our blog and they could go and do their
own stories and use that information to do whatever they would normally do, but we were putting
out that information first which gave us a great opportunity to be able to be the source for information
that was coming out of the Boston Police Department.
The challenge of that is it’s time consuming. I’m fortunate that I’ve got folks who work here in the
office—three civilians and three police officers—who all blog, Tweet, and do Facebook. We’ve used
that as an opportunity to get our stories out—good, bad, and the ugly ones. If we’re telling them
ourselves, it takes the sting out of the bad stories and it helps us refocus what we really want to talk
about, which is our good stories.
Kimberly
02:38
Great. During the aftermath of the bombings, the department’s Twitter feed was a lifeline for
Bostonians and grew from approximately 50,000 followers to more than 300,000 followers in less than
a week. What strategies did you and your team employ to keep up with the demand for information?
Cheryl
02:56
What we did is that we had already been training the media and other folks to go to our blog and to
follow us on Twitter. At the time that the explosions happened at the marathon—it was, you know,
Boston traditionally has a—the Boston Marathon is very, very important in the city of Boston. It’s a
state holiday so state offices are closed. Approximately 40,000 runners take place, take part in the
race. It’s a major event. 500,000 people line the route, the 26.2 miles. It’s a big, big event.
When the explosions happened, I only had one person working in my office. Similar to what happened
during the September 11 attacks, the phone service was not working. The cell phone service was
pretty much out—you would get a call but you wouldn’t be able to answer a call. That went on for a
little bit, and that was basically due to the volume of calls. A lot of people thought that we did
something to stop calls from going through because we were concerned about bombs, using cell
phones to detonate bombs, but that was not true.
Twitter really became a lifeline for us. At that moment, I was able to Tweet out information letting
people know that we did have explosions, that we did need people to clear the end of the marathon
running route so we could let first responders get in and be able to transport victims. We were able to
update that information to let them know that we were looking for videos, to let them know that we
did have injuries.
Information is power. It’s important to empower people and to let them know what was happening.
In addition to that, we had a tremendous amount of fear that we had to deal with. By letting people
know what’s happening, we were addressing some of that fear. You could say, “OK, this is what we
know so far.” It was still developing, and we were still in the very early stages of an investigation, but it
was important to let people know what was happening and to keep them informed the best we could
throughout the week with what was happening with the investigation, when we were holding news
conferences, correcting misinformation—when folks were Tweeting and getting on TV saying that we
had a suspect in custody when we did not, putting out the pictures of the actual suspects that we did
have, asking for the public’s help to track those folks down, and all the way through to asking people
to shelter in place and let them know what was happening during the manhunt.
It became a really good way for us to communicate, not only with traditional media, but with media
that hadn’t really been following us because we were getting inquiries from all over the world, and to
let just regular people who wanted to know what was happening and to keep up with the
investigation and to know from the source what the truth was about, what we were doing and what
was happening that entire week.
Kimberly
05:44
So what were some of the lessons that you and your team learned? Did anything from the event
change your strategy or your approach to Twitter and social media going forward?
Cheryl
05:54
I would say the lessons learned, for me anyway: I was so lucky to have a Twitter account in place when
this happened. If I had to have started a Twitter account that day I think I would have been quite
challenged trying to push the information out. I would say, first off, that any organization that really
feels that they could be dealing with a crisis would need to do is set up the infrastructure. Have a
Twitter account, have a blog, have a Facebook page, start a following with however you like to break
news.
Also, I think we were fortunate here because I have folks who have been here a while and knew what
information needed to be Tweeted out, what information we weren’t going to Tweet out, so you
have to have someone that’s responsible for handling a lot of that. What’s your message? What is it
that you need to let people know? You have to maintain that flow of information and that is
challenging. You can’t just take a leadership role and push information out through social media on day
one and then drop off the face of the earth for the rest of the week. We had to continue that flow of
information to let people know that this was a reliable, accurate place to find out what was happening
to the best that we could without jeopardizing an investigation.
Another one of the lessons that I would say that we’ve learned is that it’s essential to communicate,
internally, externally, with your partners, and to communicate with the media and the community.
That’s the key to all of this and managing it is challenging. We had morning calls where we all got on
calls with all of our partners in the morning to talk about what everybody was going to be dealing with
on that particular day and it was helpful. Was it enough? Probably not, but it was something and it was
something that all of us knew that at nine o’clock in the morning, we were all going to be able to say
where we were with what our day was going to start to look like.
We also started an e-mail chain with public information folks that we were dealing with on a local level.
While our morning call was set up with Washington people as well, the chain of e-mails with public
information people involved the FBI, the state police, the Boston Police, and some of the other police
agencies that were involved in the investigation. That helped us to stay in touch with each other on a
daily basis so if something was happening we could send out an e-mail that everybody got and we
could all respond to.
We also went to 12-hour staffing shifts here, which was really important, and they weren’t even long
enough. Folks were staying 16 hours, 18 hours a day.
It’s important also to give people an area of responsibility. In addition to dealing with the media, and
dealing with the social media, we had reporters and live trucks out on the street. While Boston is a city,
it gets very small when you start adding in all these giant satellite trucks. Someone has to manage
where they go and how they’re set up and where all their cables can run. We had people staying at
hotels so they wanted to do live shots outside hotel rooms. We had people who wanted to get as
close to the scene as they could. We had various scenes. We had the M.I.T. officer shot, there was
another scene there. All of that has to be managed by somebody that can be out on the street to do
that.
I would also say that a joint information center, which we set up with outside agencies, which each of
us sent a staff person to was also helpful. We funneled calls into that. We kept our message with all of
these agencies consistent. We were re-Tweeting each other and just trying to stay on the same page.
I would say—logistics, making sure you have a central location for news conferences. Decide who’s
going to speak, who’s going to be on the podium, and what’s the point of the news conference. Is it an
update on the investigation? Are you releasing pictures? I think all of that kind of has to be addressed
in a pre-meeting before the news conference.
It’s a lot to manage. The other part of is, don’t be afraid to ask for help. I was lucky, I did reach out to
my counterpart at the NYPD and said, “Do you have any suggestions? Can you offer me any advice?”
He was quite gracious and helpful and did both. I would say to not be worried about doing that, that
can be a nice resource.
Kimberly
10:14
That’s great. Well, thank you for your time today. We look forward to hearing more from you and your
team at the Boston Police Department on innovative ways to use social media. Thank you so much.
Cheryl
10:24
Thank you! Appreciate it.
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10:26
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10:42
The opinions contained herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official
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products, or services should not be considered an endorsement by the authors or the U.S.
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